Today's common web service architecture provides multiple services within a single infrastructure. Enterprises with common needs are also coming together to share infrastructure and business processes. An advantage of this approach is that each involved party pays only a fraction of the entire cost involved. The above-incorporated patent applications disclose a storage grid architecture that optimizes storage utilization by “gridifying” storage cells within a common infrastructure. This type of structure not only provides redundancy, but also takes performance-based parameters such as storage capacity, user requirements, etc., into consideration when selecting a file sharing location.
One issue that arises with shared infrastructures involves the deployment of platform dependent applications. A grid environment generally requires applications to be able to run under any platform to provide the best load balancing for the grid components. As such, pure Java (Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both) applications are good candidates for running in a grid environment due to their proclaimed platform independence. However, some important Java applications have to mix platform independent code with platform dependent/specific native calls. Such an application is therefore considered to be platform dependent and may only run on a platform compatible with its native code. Running a platform dependent Java application in a grid environment represents additional challenges, because of the limitation it imposes on the choice of a target platform.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need to overcome the above-cited deficiencies.